erinja:
This is basically what several people, including me, suggested earlier in the thread. Several times it was suggested that Razlem learn the language well before proposing changes to it, and Razlem seemed unwilling to learn the language beyond what he could glean from reading a grammar.

yes, sorry, I probably shouldn't have got involved. I held back for ages, not really into this whole reform discussion. I find it interesting to see Esperanto used in new ways by accomplished Esperanto speakers - that's something entirely different and certainly worth consideration!

The first 10 to 15 pages of this thread were kind of surreal, though. I mean, razlem turns up and makes some extremely vague comments about his new form of language and then everyone kicks up a big fuss - loads of comments and it's ages before razlem meakly reappears with some more ramblings - still no concrete ideas coming from him.

I think I'll just sneak off again, make my way back to other threads that make more sense to me!

Chainy:I got to page 15 of this thread, but where the hell is razlem's suggested new language?! There are loads of musings about this or that grammatical function, but no end result. Any chance of cutting through the cr@p and clearly stating what this newly created language is? Something along the lines of a Fundamento?!

I haven't put it on this thread; I didn't feel that it was appropriate.

I can send you some basic information via personal message if you would prefer that, but an introduction to my language isn't totally relevant to this thread's objective.

trojo:Well, sure. Everyone's own conlang seems perfectly natural and intuitive to THEM. Where many have gone wrong though, including you apparently, is generalizing that what seems intuitive to them must be intuitive to all humanity.

The people I've shown it to (though a relatively small few), have said it's intuitive to them.

trojo:Also, some of your biggest complaints about Esperanto are already evident in your own language project, e.g. irregular derivational morphology, non-internationalness of roots, etc.

How do you mean?

T0dd:And one can pick up isolated details of grammar, as razlem has done, although it's likely that one will miss the interconnectedness of those details.

I recognize the interconnectedness, and I'm aware that I can't just 'pluck' the role-marker from the language and not expect some sort of collapse. I've had to think and rework how the words are connected.

erinja:I'm assuming he's going to make a language that is nothing like Esperanto, and he's going to believe that his language is much "better" than Esperanto and easier to learn,

In one word, my language is different. Not better, not worse, just different. To say that my language is based on Esperanto would be inaccurate, even though it shares some grammatical characteristics.

sudanglo:Come on then, what is the structure which is simpler than the compounding of unchanging roots - which structure embraces both the 'grammar' (role marking in the sentence) and the construction of purely lexical items.

The problem is not compounding itself but rather what people have the ability to compound. This goes back to the derivational morphology argument, which I've explained already.

trojo:Also, some of your biggest complaints about Esperanto are already evident in your own language project, e.g. irregular derivational morphology, non-internationalness of roots, etc.

How do you mean?

Regarding derivational morphology, you said this before:

razlem:When you inflect a root, the vowel endings should classify the root in the same manner as other roots.

Earlier (though I see you have recently modified the example given) there was a root in your language meaning "market" with a derived verb (suffix -a) meaning "to go to market", and another root meaning "grip", with a derived verb with the same suffix meaning "to have or to take". Obviously the suffix -a doesn't have the same relationship to the first root as it does to the second. That was one of your major complaints against Esperanto in page 5 or so of this thread.

(Currently there's only one example set of derivations given instead of two, but I assume the meanings of the previously given words still stand.)

Regarding the internationalness of roots chosen, you mention only English, Chinese, and Romance languages. I was surprised to see such a limited selection of source languages, given that you criticized Esperanto so strongly for this perceived lack. Actually Esperanto casts a wider net than this, including Romance languages, English, German, Greek, Russian, Polish (and a few other Slavic languages), Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, and more. Not in equal proportions obviously, but still, if you are going to complain that Esperanto isn't universal enough, you better make sure your vocabulary is at least as "universal" as EO!

trojo:
Earlier (though I see you have recently modified the example given) there was a root in your language meaning "market" with a derived verb (suffix -a) meaning "to go to market", and another root meaning "grip", with a derived verb with the same suffix meaning "to have or to take". Obviously the suffix -a doesn't have the same relationship to the first root as it does to the second. That was one of your major complaints against Esperanto in page 5 or so of this thread.

(Currently there's only one example set of derivations given instead of two, but I assume the meanings of the previously given words still stand.)

Regarding the internationalness of roots chosen, you mention only English, Chinese, and Romance languages. I was surprised to see such a limited selection of source languages, given that you criticized Esperanto so strongly for this perceived lack. Actually Esperanto casts a wider net than this, including Romance languages, English, German, Greek, Russian, Polish (and a few other Slavic languages), Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, and more. Not in equal proportions obviously, but still, if you are going to complain that Esperanto isn't universal enough, you better make sure your vocabulary is at least as "universal" as EO!

I took out the word in question because I wanted to be able to give a full inflection of a more common noun. Just a note, the word for "market" was actually a compound word.

The verb forms of the nouns don't have a fixed meaning, and I designed it that way, because this isn't a language where every root is a fixed part of speech- everything is based on a noun. Rather than having one word mean one thing in any context, I had one word mean multiple things depending on context (this is explained in the paragraph succeeding the inflection). The situation with "ba" was to emphasize the flexibility of verb meanings, and not to list the full inflection for "grip" (which is why I just shortened it to its verb form).

If you want a description like before:
NOUN = NOUN
VERB = whatever verb you do with NOUN in context
ADJ = shares a quality with NOUN
ADV = in the manner of a shared quality of NOUN

At an earlier point in development, we used the three languages as a basis for general grammar, trying to avoid what Chinese speakers had trouble with in Esperanto. As the page states, it's under construction, and I haven't found the time to transfer all the updated data from my desktop (the table system on wikia is a b*tch). I haven't uploaded the dictionary as a result, but rest assured, I have pulled vocabulary from a variety of sources.

I do think it'll be interesting to see the end product, or if that does not come to fruition, to see where this may lead in future projects, keeping in mind that even with Esperanto, the first attempt at a conlang or an idea for putting in a conlang doesn't necessarily ever reach fruition but it tends to live on in later projects (praesperanto-esperanto-ido/esperantoII for example).

The noun derivation system will be an interesting contrast to EO's verb derivation system. While it'd be hard to test now that EO has an established community, I'd like to see what people find easier or are more attracted to in practice - making verbs out of nouns, or making nouns out of verbs.

English and many indo-european languages like the latter, where as languages like Chinese and Japanese seem to like the former (Japanese's -suru as an example).

Either way, I doubt there's a middle ground, unless someone can come up with an adjective-based word derivation system? I might try that myself (Spanish and EO I think have a primitive basic system for things like that but ultimately things are very much based on verb roots of old).

razlem:trying to avoid what Chinese speakers had trouble with in Esperanto

Be careful with this I reckon - as Arie de Jong "discovered" when reforming Volapük back in the day, Schleyer's fear that Chinese speakers wouldn't be able to pronounce the differences between L's and R's was sort of misguided (off topic, but in fact I suspect that the reason for the stereotypical Chinese/Japanese "Engrish Rangruage Plobrems" is because in those regions English is well established to the point where they get used to their own regional dialects of English thinking its normal English and therefore, like with Australian/American speakers, see their English as being perfectly OK).

Chainy, I think 'fuzziness' is built into Esperanto. It comes from the basic mechanism of Esperanto which is the shunting together of roots to make intelligible words - words whose meaning and real world application are pretty obvious to a human being - without rules of derivation.

If we just take parts of speech for the moment, the generation of meaning from the preceding element and the finaĵo is variable, not straight-jacketed.

So Bicikli means to cycle, Fumi means to smoke (both active and passive).

They are both verbal expressions of the idea of the root. But the exact relationship between the two elements is not the same in the two cases. However the meanings of the two words are pretty obvious because as human beings we know how the world is ordered and what needs labelling.

To take a lexical example, the derivation of meaning from the elements in words like 'senpova' and 'prilumi' is different in each case, but presents little difficulty to the human mind.

Border collie comprehends 1,000+ words

On the subject of conlanging, a crazy idea since only dogs like Border Collies are really into this sort of active stuff (but I personally think they're the best anyway), but perhaps making a conlang so it's clear enough with each word to be applied to dogs would be a fun idea?